Musings from a Southern software developer

Assign Pull Requests with Hubot

ChatOps was a term our DevOps person shared with me. Its the concept of automating everything you can through your company chat client. This could include monitoring, deploying, and just having fun (/pugbomb anyone?)

We implemented a pull request policy for all new code going to master. A pull request is opened by a developer on Github for the feature branch they want to merge into master. One of the biggest benefits to opening a pull request is having a peer review happen on your code where at least one other developer provides a review before it is committed to master. Fixing issues in the code at this point in the development cycle is relatively inexpensive compared to having this code fail QA, or BA sign off, or worst case, having a production incident.

Who reviews the pull requests? In the interest of being fair, it shouldn’t be a single developer that carries that burden. Pull requests can be a fantastic tool for transferring technical and domain knowledge so its best if everyone can participate. A developer might have never had occasion to work on the part of the codebase that contains the changes. For these reasons, we decided to do a round robin assignment of PRs to the developers. And yes, we fixed the bug where you get assigned your own PR 🙂

To accomplish this we utilized an open source project called Hubot that is maintained by Github and has integrations with Slack, as well as other chat clients. Hubot scripts are written in CoffeeScript, and the platform runs on Node.js. We enabled the integration between Github and Slack. A chat bot will publish a message on Slack when a pull request is opened. Hubot listens for these messages and then runs the code that you specify in response to the event. It sounds complex, but most of the heavy lifting is already done for you. You just listen for keywords, and take certain actions.

In our case, mentioning to a developer that he or she is assigned (via Slack) to a PR was sufficient for our use case. We created a new Slack channel, setup a webhook, and write a few lines of CoffeeScript to do the round robin assignment. It looks like this in Slack:

HubotSlack = require 'hubot-slack'
module.exports = (robot) ->

Require the hubot-slack module. Inside this function is where we will do our work

We list our assignees in an hash and then use robot.brain to store where we left off. This allows us to restart our client without losing our place in the round robin assignment. You will notice that the assignment hash has two usernames to allow mapping from Slack to Github user accounts in the event they are different.

This is the binding we make to listen to Github bot messages. We can’t use robot.listen since this only works for human messages. Since we are talking bot to bot, we have to utilize the SlackBotListener.

Now that we have our code in place, we can create a new Slack webhook. Inside your Slack settings click “Apps and Integrations” > “Manage” > “Incoming Webhooks”. Add a new one for the channel you want Hubot to post to and get the token. This will be needed when we start Hubot.